Eighty-ninth annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane : For the year 1901.

  • Royal Edinburgh Asylum
Date:
[1902]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Eighty-ninth annual report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the insane : For the year 1901. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cent., were in bad health and reduced condition, and 71, or 15 per cent., were in a very exhausted state, that is the best com¬ mentary I could make on the close connection of body and mind in this disease. And when I find, on going into details, that 122 of the 144, or between a third and fourth of the whole were suffering on admission from gross and evident brain disease of a incurable and deadly kind, nearly all of whom would be popu¬ larly described as cases of “ softening of the brain,” or “ paralysis,” Large amount there is scarcely any further need of accentuating the terrible disease!”0 bram nature of the diseases which we now group under the term insanity. As compared with the average rate of prevalence of Twice that of such gross organic brain diseases to the Scottish Asylums (basing Asylums, the calculations on the returns of causes of deaths in the Blue- Book), this Asylum stands at double their amount. This fact shows how large is the demand on our hospital accommodation and our nursing staff. One of the most terrible, but medically most interesting, of all Great increase those organic brain diseases, General Paralysis, has certainly be- paSysff1 come more frequent among our city population of late years. In my first ten years of office here, 1874-83, our average yearly admission rate of this disease was 20 5 cases ; in the next ten years, 1884-93, it was 25 ; in the next five years, 1894-98, it was 38-3 ; and in the last three years, 1899-1902, it has reached 49. This year particularly its prevalence is almost startling, for we had 65 cases, or 69 per 1000, resident—being over 1 case in every 7 admissions, a quite unprecedented number. The last Scottish comparison of Lunacy Blue-Book, that for 1900, contains an important statis- pYraiys^rate tical inquiry into the prevalence of this disease in Scotland. It Scotland!f°r ^ is interesting and valuable to compare our experience with the rest of the country. The Scottish Asylums, taking them all over, had a proportion of 11-6 of their deaths from this disease to every 1000 of their residents during the five years, 1885-99. During The Roya] those years we had a proportion of 36 1, or three-and-a-half times Asykimlenerai as much as the rest. But the disease is notoriously the bane of timt^/scot-106 the city dweller rather than the countryman. The Blue-Book gives land- its prevalence in the Asylums which supply Edinburgh, Glasgow, Edinburgh Aberdeen, and Dundee for the five years, 1895-99, as 22-6 per \Sgeslottish 1000 inmates, while we show a proportion for that time of 29-2, t0n3‘ and for this year of 37-2. A death-rate from this one disease among our Asylum population, just twice as large as the death-